The Velvet Underground (Icons of Pop Music)
The Velvet Underground (Icons of Pop Music)
Customer Review: Are the Velvets as serious as this book? Yes.
I’ve collected all the Velvets literature that I know exists and yet I found this book to be a fresh take on the band that made New York cool. There are so many angles to consider that you begin to wonder how such a complex group like the Velvets could produce something so simple as Sister Ray. This book explains it. I had to check out some things but I found them to be right, and there are pages of footnotes that are really fascinating in themselves. There’s some annoying stuff - was Nico really so witty? - and I don’t get the ending, which is too smart for the likes of me, but on the whole it’s a great ride, like Lou Reed’s ‘Heroin’.
Customer Review: The Velvets. A serious Witts-ism
It must be a near impossible brief to write something aimed at both music undergrads and the `general reader’, which this book claims to do but I think Richard Witts pretty much manages to pull it off. `The Velvet Underground’ is the first in a series of books on pop icons, (Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and others are to follow) which not only examines the musical, social and cultural influences on `The Velvets’ but which proves to be at one and the same time a downright enjoyable read.
Although set against the background of Manhattan’s down town drug culture, this is no seedy romp through the under belly of the 1960s New York music scene. This is a serious book in which just about every aspect of the band’s genesis, demise and subsequent influence on punk, post punk and rock music is covered. Each Velvet in turn is subjected to detailed scrutiny in terms of background, his/her gravitation to New York City, musical interests and experiences, influences felt, and contribution to the band and its radical sound-world.
Cale’s Experimentalism and his association with the avant-gardist La Monte Young and The Theatre of Eternal Youth, probably receives the most overtly academic analysis, but Reed, Morrison, Tucker, Nico, Warhol and Morrissey are also fully scrutinized in a clear, cogent and well argued challenge to much of the myth and hyperbole which has grown up around this `confluence of misfits’ (Witts).
Serious it might be, but anecdotes a-plenty and some sharp comments stop it slipping into too-dry academic commentary. (There’s a very funny Witts-ism following a Nico quote which I won’t reveal. You can read it for yourself.) So, as long as the general reader who picks up this book has a somewhat serious interest in music or The Velvets, I doubt he will be disappointed. And if the undergrads ever get around to opening the cover, even they might come away having learned something pertinent 
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Pet Shop Boys: Pop Art: The Hits-Music Book
Pet Shop Boys: Pop Art: The Hits-Music Book
Customer Review: All the best…
This is the ‘greatest hits’ of the Pet Shop Boys. There are several versions of this collection with minor variations and extra tracks, so be advised to check the listings carefully for the song-selections and tracks. Some include a book (most of the PSB Japanese offerings) with lyrics and such, but sometimes that is the only difference.
The first of the discs of this ‘Greatest Hits’ for the Pet Shop Boys contains 17 tracks (Pop), and the second 18 tracks (Art). For those who are die-hard fans of the Pet Shop Boys, this is a must have, but, for the most part, those fans will find it is in many ways an already-have. The tracks are remastered, but given the high production qualities of most PSB discs generally, there isn’t a great deal to be gained from this. There are two new songs, Miracles and Flamboyant (one on each disc), which are both wonderful (and, interestingly, the addition of two songs to the ‘greatest hits’ compilation matches their performance with Discography, which also had a ‘best of’ with two new tracks added).
There are the major songs and single releases from all previous albums, so this serves both as a retrospective but also as a handy all-in-one collection spanning the history of the Pet Shop Boys; from that perspective, if you were to have just one CD from them, this would the one. The songs are not in chronological release order (as Discography was), but rather seem almost randomly arranged; all songs but one from Discography are here, with an additional collection of tracks from the later album releases that reached the UK top 20. The division between ‘Pop’ and ‘Art’ is subtle, and any lifelong fan will have his or her own impressions as to which songs should fit into which category. The ‘Pop’ side is more disco/dance music, whereas the ‘Art’ side is a little more sombre, and the lyrics a little more complex. On the other hand, some songs, such as ‘Love comes quickly’ would easily qualify for either designation.
This collection represents more than 20 years work on the part of Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe. For the first several years of that career, they were famous world-wide, and quite a staple in the dance clubs and video programming in America and elsewhere. The first singles collection ‘Discography’ represented the beginning of the decline of 80s style dance music in America, but the music descended from this type remained strongly popular throughout the rest of the world, as the sold-out concert tours of the Pet Shop Boys everywhere except North America attests to. Many of the songs on this ‘Pop-Art’ collection will therefore be new to audiences whose interest in the Pet Shop Boys ended the hits from the ‘Behaviour’ era.
The bonus disc offers remixes of songs from the other discs, and tracks from B-sides and other tracks from the ‘major’ albums.
Pop-Art is a must-have for anyone who likes dance music, disco, electronic music, 80s music, the Pet Shop Boys, or who wants to have a complete music collection, but only one version is likely necessary.
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In the Fascist Bathroom: Punk in Pop Music, 1977-92
In the Fascist Bathroom: Punk in Pop Music, 1977-92
Customer Review: FUN AND INFORMATIVE
A collection on punk and related matters from 1977 through 1992, including what was left out of Marcus’ earlier book Lipstick Traces. In the author’s own words, it’s about “records, performances, twists of the radio dial.” It moves from the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy” to Nirvana’s “Nevermind” in this illumined golden thread. Marcus writes about what moved, scared and disgusted him and what made him feel so privileged to be part of the punk audience. His views of punk encompassed a wide horizon, to include the likes of Bruce Springsteen, early Prince, Laurie Anderson and David Lynch’s film Blue Velvet. His point is that punk made wonderful things like Anderson’s “Superman” possible even though Superman itself isn’t punk. In other words, punk’s liberating effect caused sea changes in the perception of pop. A major weakness of the book is that it ignores the entire New York scene, because, as he puts it, “most [New York] punks seemed to be auditioning for careers as something else.” So no Patti Smith, no Richard Hell, a cursory mention of Talking Heads, but you WILL find Blondie here. Fascist Bathroom follows many avenues (The Clash, Sex Pistols, Elvis Costello) but maybe its most precious contribution is rescuing from obscurity some lower-profile such as Laura Logic, The Mekons, Marianne Faithfull. It’s a joy to read, chronologically arranged and ending with Nirvana and grunge in the 90s. The text swarms with relevant quotes from rock lyrics and references to other rock journalists like Lester Bangs. For anyone with a passionate interest in rock/pop music and youth culture, it’s required reading.
Customer Review: The secret history of a time that has passed
To find that no one has yet reviewed this book surprised and excited me. Surprise because I find it incredible that such a definitive, poetic and unique document could pass the world by unnoticed. Excitement because the pleasure, dare I say honour, of having my name next to the first review is genuine.
Let me put my cards on the table: this is my favourite book. One may have read a work that is the most enjoyable they have experienced, or another which seems the most accomplished and towering, but these criteria shouldn’t, I think, define such a judgement. What it rest on is less the distant appreciation of greatness than the ability of the work to both excite and persist in exciting, years after one has put it down. Just to think of the best passages in this book excites me: their sense of possibility, of the value of creativity, of the politics that go hand in hand with creation and the burden of those who take them on.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. What is this book about? A collection of pieces about punk? Certainly, but more than that: a mirror held up to a life lived with rock music as a constant companion. A view of a cultural earthquake by a man who, by the time the Sex Pistols were provoking tabloid hysteria, was past the age when many would consider an obsession with pop comprehendible.
Thus, the first piece in the book is not about punk at all, at least not in the spittle-fuelled generic sense. Writing for Rolling Stone Magazine in 1969, the author blends his review of The Rolling Stones’ Let It Bleed with his thoughts on a coffee-table thome of David Bailey portraits. Out of this seemingly bizarre scramble Marcus pulls a remarkably prescient picture of a decade fizzling away - a time when dreams are turning sour as people struggle to remember how alive with possibility those very dreams seemed a few short years ago, a time when aspirations of change and fulfilment turn into mere hopes for survival. In Bailey’s portraits of Christine Keeler and The Stones Marcus finds a wistful nostalgia for a time that has yet to fully pass, while in the longing cries of Gimme Shelter he hears men confused about where they have reached, wondering what ever got them there, what ever set them on the journey, but knowing that the journey is all they have, that they can never go back now.
His view of the decade is perfectly, poetically expressed in another, much later piece, as he pulls Oliver Stone’s film of The Doors from the critical dustbin:
“[it contains] a vision of the Sixties as a time that, even as it came forth, people sensed they could never really inhabit, and also never really leave.”
That sense of displacement, of people fighting to find meaning in the dreams they have created, of the danger of those dreams, for them and maybe for us, is the transcendent quality that informs his work and takes it far beyond the level of an ascetic treatise or even a cultural history.
To punk then. The opening salvo is delivered from the heart of the arena just as the theatre burns down- the Sex Pistols last concert in San Francisco. I have never read any piece of writing, let alone any this short, that describes a scene of anger, violence, confusion and confrontation so vividly. His description of Rotten’s stage manner is followed by an almost wistful sign off.
“His teeth were ground down to points… he held his microphone like a man leaning into a wind tunnel… [at the end of the concert] he gathered up the debris around him, took one final look and was gone, and we may never see his like again.”
Perhaps the Pistols had punched the hole, but many others would flood through the breach. As this writing moves through the late Seventies and in to the Eighties in becomes a parallel story of the way ‘real life’ - politics both personal and public - inform creativity and shape its reception, of how these politics can often seem to define the borders of what is relevant in pop and how sometimes, just sometimes, that equation can seem reversed.
Inevitably the cold, hard gloom of Thatcher and Reagan becomes the backdrop and, though they are rarely mentioned explicitly, the transformation in public discourse they unleashed becomes the all-consuming concern. In this climate Marcus makes the most free-wheeling of connections seem not merely plausible, but vital. In the book’s most moving passage the murder of John Lennon seems like a logical coda to the election of Ronald Reagan, and a dollar comic book seems to truly seal the shame of the age. Some of the figures he writes of move within this new climate, others kick and scream, some dig themselves in and are fated to become cranks, fighting lost battles.
Ending with the improbable resurgence of punk in the form of Nirvana et al, and finally bookending the volume with further thoughts on the shadow that the Sixties can still often cast over us, this writing resurrects years now as distant in memory as the other more celebrated eras of pop.
As for the artists, perhaps their final question becomes: how does one find meaning in a world that has been transformed into everything one once set face against? Therein lies the dilemma posed by the title, but you’ll have to read this wonderful book yourself to understand that conundrum.
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Pop Music in British Cinema: A Chronicle (BFI Film Classics)
Pop Music in British Cinema: A Chronicle (BFI Film Classics)
Customer Review: A real must-have book for British music and cinema lovers
A marvellously detailed book of musical facts and figures of British cinema. The book is sorted by year, and the 1960s and 1970s are particularly interesting as unlikely pop musicians found their music (and sometimes themselves!) on screen. Kevin digs out many obscure films that have long since been forgotten (and some they’d like us to forget!). My only criticism is that I’d like to have known a little more about each film, plot/rating etc, like Fred Dellar’s 1981 book, but this is minor stuff. My advice? Buy this book!
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